Union Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Friday, 12 June 2026 invoked a series of flagship central welfare programmes to argue that women have been repositioned — under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government — from passive beneficiaries to primary drivers of India's economic growth, marking what he called 12 years of Nari Shakti.

Context

Posting in Hindi on X, Puri wrote: 'आज भारत की नारी केवल घर की शक्ति नहीं, वह अर्थव्यवस्था की शक्ति है, विकास की शक्ति है' — 'Today India's woman is not merely the strength of the home; she is the strength of the economy, the strength of development.' He added that any nation's progress accelerates when its women are empowered, and credited PM Modi's leadership over the past twelve years with making that shift possible.

The post was accompanied by a video and carried the hashtag #12YearsOfNariShakti, situating the message within a broader BJP communication exercise marking a dozen years of the National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre.

Policy Backdrop

Puri highlighted five specific programmes. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, launched in May 2016, provided LPG connections to below-poverty-line households headed by women, freeing them from cooking on open biomass stoves — a leading cause of indoor air pollution and respiratory illness among rural women.

The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, rolled out in August 2014, brought millions of previously unbanked women into the formal financial system, giving them individual bank accounts and a verifiable economic identity. The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, launched in 2015, mandated or strongly preferred women's or joint ownership of allotted homes, converting a housing subsidy into a property-rights intervention.

Puri also cited the Lakhpati Didi initiative — embedded within the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) — which targets women in self-help groups for skill and enterprise support aimed at pushing annual household income past Rs 1 lakh. Finally, the PM SVANidhi scheme, introduced in June 2020, extended collateral-free working-capital loans to urban street vendors, a category with significant female participation.

Stakeholders and Impact

The programmes together cover a wide demographic: rural women dependent on biomass fuel, unbanked adults in semi-urban and rural areas, self-help group members in villages, and women micro-entrepreneurs operating pavement businesses in cities. Each scheme addresses a distinct barrier — health, financial access, asset ownership, income, and credit — that has historically constrained women's economic participation.

Since 2014, the Union government has increasingly framed these interventions under an explicit gender lens, arguing that converting women from welfare recipients into enterprise participants is structurally necessary for India to sustain higher national growth. Puri's post reinforces that narrative, describing the transformation as 'not merely the result of schemes, but of a philosophy that believes the path to a Viksit Bharat (developed India) runs through the empowerment of women.'

What's Next

Attention will now turn to the next Union Budget and whether allocations for these schemes are renewed or expanded, particularly for Lakhpati Didi and PM SVANidhi, where outreach targets have been periodically revised upward. The pending implementation of the Women's Reservation Bill — which reserves 33 per cent of Lok Sabha and state assembly seats for women but is linked to delimitation — remains a legislative milestone that would complete the policy arc Puri describes. Whether the government accelerates that timeline will be a key indicator of how far the 'Nari Shakti' framing translates into structural political representation.